American foreign policy

Imperial instincts

America’s longing for an empire has a long history

NEARLY 50 years ago, when William Appleman Williams, one of the 20th century's most important historians of diplomacy, drew attention to America's persistent search for an empire, he was denounced for being pro-communist.

To challenge deeply held beliefs about American innocence was shocking enough. To contradict cold-war propaganda was worse. Recently, however, such ideological conformism has been disappearing. It has become acceptable to speak of empire, both among those who defend American foreign policy and those who condemn it. “If people want to say we're an imperial power—fine,” says William Kristol, a right-wing commentator. Two years ago, in “Dangerous Nation”, Mr Kristol's fellow neoconservative, Robert Kagan, also acknowledged the aggressive side of American behaviour.

Now Walter Nugent, of Notre Dame University, has produced a comprehensive history of how the thrust of empire shaped American history. He stops short of recent years, scarcely mentioning the Iraq war. But he makes it plain that the policies of the present administration have a pedigree that goes back even to the Founding Fathers: Thomas Jefferson himself hoped for “an empire for liberty”.

Mr Nugent points out that although there have been many accounts of specific events and ideas—among them the expulsion of the southern Indians down the Trail of Tears, Manifest Destiny or the Spanish-American war and the conquest of the Philippines—“telling the whole story reveals patterns that individual episodes do not.”

Expansion came in three phases. First, the drive from the Atlantic colonies to the Pacific, in which settler pressure, boosted by extraordinary demographic growth, demanded the acquisition of territory. In the second, America acquired colonies and protectorates around the Pacific and the Caribbean. With the second world war and the cold war, “a third phase of American empire-building, still with us, came into being.” Thus, Mr Nugent concludes, “we have always been an imperial nation, and remain so, but the shape of the American empire has shifted over time.”

Perhaps the most original section of the book is Mr Nugent's account of how America, in negotiation with Britain, France and Spain at the end of the war of independence, acquired the territory between the Appalachian mountains and the Mississippi. He points out that in 1782 hardly any Americans were pressing to follow acquisition with settlement. So Benjamin Franklin, John Jay and John Adams were able to exploit the rivalry of the European powers to acquire this huge territory without either conquest or migration.

Successive chapters recount the Louisiana Purchase (Mr Nugent maintains that Napoleon almost certainly sold territory to which he did not have clear title); the exploitation of Napoleon's invasion of Spain to acquire the Floridas; the Mexican war and the addition of the present states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and more at the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. He also shows how Britain, by brandishing naval power, was able to prevent America from taking over British Columbia. He goes on with William Seward's purchase of Alaska and the colonial or pseudo-colonial adventures of the Spanish-American war and the early 20th century: Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Panama, Haiti and Nicaragua.

Mr Nugent interprets the whole of the American story in terms of the contrast between the ideals of the republic and the “unadmitted reality” of empire, explaining this as a consequence of the American claim to “exceptionalism”. His countrymen “should understand that their claim to exceptionalism is valid only in terms of their unparalleled growth and the remarkable natural resources their vast country has provided them. They are not exceptional, however, in any sense of moral innocence or purity.”

In this he undervalues, quite unfairly, the genuine originality of the American political achievement. If Americans have always had the habit of empire, they have also endowed the world with the ideal of popular sovereignty. Yet Mr Nugent is right to emphasise the persistence of the expansionist strand in American history. Because they believed in the unique nature of their liberty, Americans felt justified in expanding it. Usefully, and originally, Mr Nugent has explained the connection between the two “habits”, of coveting territory and of justifying expansion in the name of freedom.